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In August 2018, Pope Francis promulgated a new Catholic Catechism that deemed the death penalty “inadmissible” in all cases and committed the Church to working to abolish capital punishment worldwide. Cardinal Blase Cupich, the ninth Bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, joined DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham on the latest episode of the podcast Discussions with DPIC, to explore the implications of the new teachings and how they fit into the Church’s broader message on social justice and the sanctity of life. Saying “human dignity is at center of all we say and do,” Cardinal Cupich stressed that church leaders working to end capital punishment “have to make the case for human dignity just as forcefully as we do in other areas,” for the poor, for refugees, for the marginalized, and for the unborn. “All of the advocacy that we do for all of these people has to have a social or civic or political dimension to it,” the Cardinal explained. The continued use of the death penalty is “a stain on our country,” he said. “Let’s be honest. No life that was taken away can ever be replaced by taking away another life. We cannot teach that killing is wrong by killing.”

Texas plans to execute Joseph Garcia on December 4, 2018, for the murder of a police officer during a robbery in which Garcia neither killed anyone nor intended or expected that a killing would take place. His case renews questions about a Texas law called the “law of parties” that allows defendants to be sentenced to death based upon the actions and intent of others, if the defendant played even a small role in a crime that resulted in someone’s death.

Garcia was one of the “Texas 7,” a group of men who escaped from a maximum-security Texas prison on December 13, 2000. After escaping, the men robbed a sporting goods store, where some of the men were confronted by police officer Aubrey Hawkins. Garcia graphically described the robbery in a radio interview with David Martin Davies for the Texas Public Radio program, Texas Matters. Garcia admitted to participating in the escape and the robbery but insisted he never fired his gun and was still inside the store when he heard gunfire break out. He tried to stop the shooting, and during the confusion in which Officer Hawkins was killed, Garcia himself came under fire by others in the group. “I don't know what caused them to start firing at the officer. By the time I got out there on the back dock, it was over,” he said.

Under Texas’s law of parties, accomplices who participated in one felony can be held responsible for other felonies committed by other participants. Since Garcia participated in robbing the store, he was eligible to be charged with the capital murder of Officer Hawkins, whether or not he fired a gun. In the Texas Matters interview from death row, Garcia questioned the reasoning behind his death sentence. “Why am I here? Why am I on death row? You know, I don't get it,” Garcia said. “Why are you trying to kill me for the actions of somebody else?”

Texas Rep. Harold Dutton (D – Houston) has filed legislation to end the law of parties. “We shouldn’t use the law of parties to convict anybody of capital murder,” he said. “I think we ought to reserve that for the person who actually did the murder.” Garcia’s lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of executing a person who neither killed nor intended that a killing take place. Texas prosecutors have argued that the Supreme Court should not hear the issue because Garcia’s prior lawyers should have raised the issue years ago. Three of the Texas 7 have already been executed, and a fourth killed himself to avoid capture.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has unanimously overturned the death sentence imposed on Virginia death-row prisoner Mark E. Lawlor in 2011, ruling that the trial court had unconstitutionally prevented Lawlor from presenting expert mental health testimony that he posed a low risk of violence in prison if the jury spared his life. On November 27, 2018, the court reversed a decision of a Virginia federal district court that had upheld Lawlor’s conviction and sentence, ordering that he be granted a new sentencing hearing.

At trial, the judge prevented Lawlor’s defense team from calling a clinical psychologist—an expert in prison risk assessment and adaptation—who would have testified that Lawlor posed a very low risk of committing future acts of violence in prison. The testimony was offered both as mitigating evidence to support a sentence of life without parole and to rebut the prosecution’s aggravating circumstance that Lawlor “would constitute a continuing serious threat to society.” Writing for the unanimous court, Judge Stephanie D. Thacker said the state courts had disregarded clearly established U.S. Supreme Court law requiring that a capital defendant must be permitted to present and the sentencer must be permitted to consider “any admissible mitigating information in determining whether to assign the defendant a sentence less than death.” The court referenced the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Skipper v. South Carolina which specifically applied that constitutional requirement to evidence of post-arrest good conduct in prison.

In the mid-1990s, Virginia was one of only three states that offered juries a choice of sentencing a capital defendant to life without parole or death, but refused to inform the jury that a life sentence meant no possibility of parole. Death sentences dropped dramatically in Virginia after juries were truthfully instructed on their sentencing options. David Bruck, Clinical Professor of Law and Director of Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse at Washington & Lee—who argued several of the U.S. Supreme Court cases requiring that juries be told about the life-without-parole option—said, “Virginia excludes evidence that every other death penalty state allows juries to have, so it’s not surprising that sooner or later the Virginia rule was going to be struck down by the federal courts. It’s always been illogical that the Virginia courts have restricted the evidence that juries can consider about whether an inmate would be nonviolent and well-behaved if sentenced to life without parole.”

Edward Ungvarsky, one of the lawyers who represented Lawlor, said Lawlor and his defense team were “grateful for the ruling. We thought there was nothing more important for jurors in making the decision about life in prison than to hear [whether] the person would be violent in prison. This court’s ruling brings Virginia into agreement with the entire rest of the country.” Lawlor was one of three men on Virginia’s death row, and his 2011 death sentence was the last one imposed in the state.

Twenty months after the Unites States Supreme Court unanimously struck down Texas’s non-scientific standard for evaluating intellectual disability in death penalty cases, the landmark case in which it made that decision is back before the Court. On December 7, 2018, the Court will conference Moore v. Texas, to decide if it will review whether the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) once again unconstitutionally relied on lay stereotypes and non-clinical criteria in rejecting Bobby James Moore’s claim that he is not subject to the death penalty because he is intellectually disabled. A diverse group of prominent voices, including the district attorney’s office that originally prosecuted Moore, argue that Moore clearly satisfies the clinical definitions of intellectual disability and may not be executed.

Sentenced to death more than 38 years ago, Moore has a long history of intellectual and adaptive impairments that have been documented since his childhood, including IQ scores ranging from the low 50s to the low 70s. The American Psychological Association and American Bar Association filed briefs on November 7 supporting Moore’s claim and the urging the Supreme Court to again reverse the Texas court. They were joined by a group of prominent conservatives—including former Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, Congressman Bob Barr, conservative strategist Richard Viguerie, and David A. Keene, the longtime chair of the National Conservative Union, among others—whose brief, also filed November 7, described the Texas court’s decision as a threat to the integrity of the judicial process. They wrote: “Quoting a Supreme Court decision highlighting the errors made by the CCA in its previous review of this case, but proceeding to make those same errors on remand, is inimical to the rule of law.”

Moore initially presented his claim that he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty under the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Atkins v. Virginia to a Harris County, Texas trial court. Following contemporary medical diagnostic criteria, the court agreed that Moore was intellectual disabled and ruled that his death sentence should be vacated. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed, applying an idiosyncratic standard based on unscientific stereotypes, including the behavior of a fictional character from the novel Of Mice and Men. After the U.S. Supreme Court reversed and remanded for a new decision “informed by the medical community’s diagnostic framework,” the Harris County District Attorney’s office conceded that Moore qualified as intellectually disabled. Nonetheless, in a ruling three dissenters criticized as an “outlier,” a sharply divided (5-3) Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in June 2018 again upheld Moore’s death sentence.

In a November 28 op-ed in The Washington Post, Starr, who served as United States Solicitor General under President George H.W. Bush from 1989-1993, urged the Supreme Court to “save[] Bobby Moore from execution … again.” Starr wrote, “The job of a judge is to follow the law … [and] carefully apply the precedent of the Supreme Court. … If the system were working as it should, Moore’s case would have been a routine matter of the Texas court applying the Supreme Court’s decision and current medical standards as directed and prohibiting Moore’s execution.” Quoting then-U.S. appeals court Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, Starr said: “As a lower court in a system of absolute vertical stare decisis headed by one Supreme Court, it is essential that we follow both the words and the music of Supreme Court decisions.”

Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver also asked the Supreme Court to block Moore’s execution. In a November 19 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Shriver criticized the Texas court’s reasoning as “absurd, wrong and harmful.” “But most important,” Shriver wrote, the standard the court applied was “not how the medical community diagnoses intellectual disability…. Pervasive stereotypes about intellectual disability are inaccurate and harmful. In this Texas court case, they are a matter of life or death. Let’s finally recognize the complexity of people with intellectual disability,” Shriver said. “The world will be much richer for it.”

For the past three-and-a-half years, Texas has purchased execution drugs from a Houston-based compounding pharmacy that, BuzzFeed News reports, “has been cited for scores of safety violations” and whose license to operate is currently on probation. In an exclusive story by investigative reporter Chris McDaniel, BuzzFeed discovered that Texas secretly obtained execution drugs from the Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy, a pharmacy that the Texas State Board of Pharmacy has cited for 48 violations in the past eight years, including “keeping out-of-date drugs in stock, using improper procedures to prepare IV solutions, and inadequate cleaning of hands and gloves.” Greenpark’s license was put on probation in November 2016 after it botched a prescription for three children, sending one of them to the hospital for emergency care. Instead of providing the children lansoprazole, a drug to treat high levels of stomach acid, the pharmacy gave them lorazepam, an anti-anxiety drug similar to Xanax. A pharmacy technician was found to have forged quality-control documents relating to the incident. Two hundred compounding pharmacies are currently licensed in Texas, and Greenpark is one of only eight whose license is on probation or revoked.

The discovery of Greenpark’s tainted safety history comes in the wake of suggestions by medical experts that the drugs used in recent Texas executions may have been outdated or impure. The last words of five of the eleven prisoners executed in Texas so far in 2018 indicated that they experienced burning after the execution drug, pentobarbital, was injected. Pentobarbital, an anesthetic, is intended to produce a painless execution. In January, as the state executed Anthony Shore, he called out, “I can feel that it does burn. Burning!” Juan Castillo, Troy Clark, Christopher Young, and Danny Bible all said the drug burned or hurt during their executions. A sixth prisoner, William Rayford, was observed writhing and shaking on the gurney after the drug injection. Dr. David Waisel, an anesthesiologist and Harvard Medical School professor, wrote in a 2016 affidavit, “Improper compounding and testing procedures may leave fine particles undetectable by the naked eye in the solution, or larger particles that would not be detected by an untrained eye. These particles can cause great irritation to the vein, resulting in extraordinary pain.”

Both Texas and Greenpark sought to keep the pharmacy’s identity secret, but BuzzFeed obtained documents showing that Texas sent the compounding pharmacy the raw ingredients for pentobarbital in April 2015 and February 2016. In June 2018, Greenpark submitted a declaration in a lethal-injection suit, using the pseudonym “Pharmacy X,” stating that its “decision to supply the Texas Department of Criminal Justice with lethal injection chemicals was and is contingent on Pharmacy X’s identity remaining secret.” The declaration asserted that “Pharmacy X will no longer conduct business with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice” if its identity is disclosed or revealed.

As federal prosecutors dropped the death penalty against a Navajo man accused of killing a police officer on Navajo land, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in a separate case on the status of a treaty establishing the borders of the Creek Nation reservation that could determine whether Oklahoma has jurisdiction to carry out the death penalty against a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe. The two cases highlight issues of Native American tribal sovereignty with potentially profound implications for the administration of capital punishment under state and federal death penalty laws.

On November 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Carpenter v. Murphy, Oklahoma’s appeal of a lower federal court decision that overturned the conviction and death sentence of Patrick Murphy, a citizen of the Creek Nation, for a murder the federal court ruled was committed in Indian Country, on lands within the boundaries of the Creek Nation reservation established by treaty in 1866. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled in August 2017 that because the homicide with which Murphy was charged “was committed in Indian country, the Oklahoma state courts lacked jurisdiction to try him.” Under the federal Major Crimes Act, the court said, Murphy could be prosecuted by federal authorities, but not by the state. Because of tribal opposition to the death penalty, Murphy would not face capital prosecution under the act. Muscogee (Creek) Nation Principal Chief James Floyd hailed the Circuit court’s decision as “affirm[ing] the right of the Nation and all other Indian Nations to make and enforce their own laws within their own boundaries.”

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only Congress had authority to disestablish or diminish an Indian reservation. Congress has never explicitly disestablished the Creek reservation. However, Oklahoma appealed the court’s ruling, arguing that the admission of Oklahoma into the Union in 1907 superseded the treaty and disestablished the reservation. Arguing for Murphy, Ian Gershengorn told the Court that the tribe has never ceded authority over the lands and “for the last 40 years, … when the Creek Nation adopted a constitution in 1979, they asserted political jurisdiction to the extent of their 1900 boundaries.” The Court’s decision in the case could affect criminal prosecutions in an 11-county region of eastern Oklahoma.

In New Mexico, federal prosecutors on November 19 withdrew their notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Kirby Cleveland in the killing of a tribal police officer. In January 2018, U.S. attorneys announced they would capitally prosecute Cleveland, prompting opposition from the Navajo Nation, which holds the official position that “capital punishment is not an acceptable form of punishment.” Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch stated in a letter, “The death penalty is counter to the cultural beliefs and traditions of the Navajo People who value life and place a great emphasis on the restoration of harmony through restoration and individual attention.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office had argued that because the murder involved the death of a police officer, the tribe’s position was not binding on the federal government. The case was further complicated by the fact that the state of New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009, so a death-penalty prosecution was counter to the policy of the state in which the crime took place.

For the second time in less than six months, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) has upheld a death sentence that the trial court, lawyers for the prosecution and defense, and mental health experts all agree should not be carried out. On November 21, 2018, in an unpublished and unsigned opinion that misspelled death-row prisoner Jeffery Wood's name, the court rejected a recommendation by the Kerr County District Court to overturn Wood’s death sentence and grant him a new sentencing trial. The trial court had found that Wood’s death sentence was the unconstitutional by-product of “false or misleading testimony” and “false scientific evidence” by Dr. James Grigson, a discredited psychiatrist who had been expelled from state and national professional associations for his unethical practices in predicting a defendant’s future dangerousness.

Grigson, whose testimony for the prosecution in more than 100 death penalty cases earned him the nickname “Dr. Death,” had been expelled by the American Psychiatric Association and the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians for providing scientifically invalid guarantees that defendants he had never personally examined would commit future acts of violence if spared the death penalty. Grigson never personally examined Wood, and the jury was not told that Grigson’s practice violated professional ethical norms and had led to his expulsion from the psychiatric associations. Nonetheless, over the dissent of two judges, the TCCA ruled that Grigson’s testimony did not materially affect the jury’s decision to sentence Wood to death.

Wood’s case received national attention before his August 24, 2016 execution date was stayed, because he was convicted under Texas’ law of parties despite his minimal involvement in the crime. Wood was the getaway driver in a gas station robbery. His co-defendant, Daniel Reneau, shot and killed the store clerk while Wood was sitting outside in the car. “I’m not aware of another case in which a person has been executed with as minimal participation and culpability as Jeff,” said Jared Tyler, Wood's attorney. “It’s a national first in that regard if the state does actually execute him.” In response to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision to reject Wood’s appeal, Tyler said, "The decision to let stand a death sentence based on false expert testimony can only erode public confidence in Texas's criminal justice system. This is particularly so given that all the parties agree that Mr. Wood's death sentence is disproportionate."

Wood’s case is also unique because of statements made by the prosecutor who tried his case. Kerr County District Attorney Lucy Wilke asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant clemency for Wood, saying that his death sentence was disproportionate and that she was unaware of Dr. Grigson’s expulsion from psychiatric associations at the time of Wood’s trial. "Had I known about Dr. Grigson’s issues with said organizations, I would not have used him as the State’s expert witness in this case on the issue of future dangerousness,” Wilke wrote in a letter to the board. She later indicated that she would not seek to resentence Wood to death if his death sentence were overturned. Conservative and evangelical leaders and the editorial boards of major national and Texas newspapers also supported Wood’s plea for clemency in 2016.

On November 21, 2018, Kentucky marked 10 years since its last execution, becoming the eleventh current death-penalty state that has not carried out an execution in more than a decade. Another 20 states have legislatively or judicially abolished their death-penalty laws, bringing the number of states that do not actively use the death penalty to 31. On the day before Kentucky reached its 10-year milestone, a lawsuit filed in federal court highlighted some of the greatest dangers of capital punishment in the Commonwealth. On November 20, Nickie Miller—a military veteran and cancer patient who spent two years in jail facing a possible death sentence before murder charges against him were dropped in 2017—filed a lawsuit against Montgomery County, Kentucky and local and state law enforcement officials alleging that they had conspired to frame him for murder.

Miller’s complaint names six people involved in his investigation and prosecution as defendants: Montgomery County Sheriff Fred Shortridge, Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Keith Craycraft, Detectives Ralph Charles Jr. and Mark Collier, county jailer Eric Jones, and Kentucky State Police Polygraph Examiner John Fyffe. The complaint alleges that the defendants fabricated and destroyed evidence, testified falsely, and coerced a woman into falsely implicating Miller by threatening to take her children unless she provided the statement they wanted. It specifically claims that Fyffe and the sheriff’s officers “conspired to take [Miller’s] liberty by knowingly initiating false charges based on evidence that the Defendants fabricated.” According to the complaint, the alleged misconduct “had a profound impact” on Miller’s health, denying him “proper medical treatment [for his cancer], including chemotherapy, while incarcerated.” “The defendants succeeded in manipulating the justice system for several years, including falsely accusing Mr. Miller of capital murder and seeking the death penalty against a clearly innocent man,” defense investigator Joshua Powell said. “Mr. Miller has suffered tremendous damage, mental suffering, cancer recurrence and loss of a normal life, all caused by the defendants’ misconduct.”

Kentucky has imposed 97 death sentences since reinstating the death penalty in 1975. More than half (49) of those convictions or sentences have been overturned, including the conviction of Larry Osborne, who was exonerated in 2002. Two of the three men executed in Kentucky waived some or all of their appeals, “essentially committing legal suicide,” said Damon Preston, a Public Advocate at the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. Preston also said that Kentucky’s death penalty system deprives families of closure: “It’s hard to see how the family would get resolution when the cases go on for so long. But the reason cases go on for so long is because the death penalty in Kentucky doesn’t work. If a defendant is sentenced to life without parole, that defendant gets an appeal to the Kentucky Supreme Court and then the case is essentially over.” Executions in Kentucky have been under a judicial hold since 2010, as a result of challenges to the lethal-injection protocol. The Attorney General’s Office is scheduled to file its brief in the lethal-injection case on November 30, but additional hearings and briefing are expected before the court issues a ruling in the case.

The Tennessee Supreme Court has set execution dates for six men on the state's death row, scheduling their executions for between May 16, 2019 and April 9, 2020. This mass execution schedule, issued on November 16, 2018, comes in the wake of the controversial executions of Billy Ray Irick and Edmund Zagorski earlier this year and as the state prepares to execute David Earl Miller on December 6. If all seven scheduled executions take place, Tennessee will have conducted more executions in a two-year period than it had in the rest of the 45-year modern era of the death penalty.

Prior to Irick's August 9, 2018 execution, Tennessee had carried out only six executions since bringing back the death penalty in February 1974, all of them between 2000 and 2009. Tennessee's execution method and the state supreme court's handling of lethal-injection litigation has come under criticism, as a newly constituted conservative court majority permitted prison officials to refuse to provide evidence of their claimed efforts to obtain an alternative execution drug, expedited its consideration of death-row state prisoners' challenge to the state three-drug lethal-injection protocol to facilitate Zagorski’s execution, and refused to consider medical evidence concerning Irick’s reportedly torturous execution.

Irick was executed over scathing dissents from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who called it “barbarism,” and Tennessee Supreme Court Justice Sharon Lee, who criticized the state's “rush to execute” and said that the state’s evasion of questions concerning the availability of pentobarbital as an alternative to execution with the state’s three-drug formula had rendered the trial court proceedings in the case “meaningless.” Lee later blasted the “rocket docket” created by the court’s removal of the prisoners’ lethal-injection challenge from an intermediate appeals court so the high court could decide the case before Zagorski's scheduled execution. “Given the gravity of the issues presented in this appeal, the voluminous record to be reviewed, and the legal analysis to be made, the [court’s] super-expedited schedule is wholly inadequate,” she wrote.

Autopsy reports from Irick’s execution became available after the court established its expedited schedule. Edmund Zagorski’s defense lawyers then provided the court with an affidavit from a prominent medical expert who concluded that Irick had not been properly anesthetized, leaving him “aware and sensate during his execution.” Irick “would have experienced the feeling of choking, drowning in his own fluids, suffocating, being buried alive, and the burning sensation caused by the injection of the potassium chloride,” the doctor wrote. After hearing argument, the court refused to consider that medical evidence and upheld the execution protocol. Zagorski then opted to be executed by electrocution. His attorney said of the decision, “[Tennessee] has coerced Mr. Zagorski — with the threat of extreme chemical torture via a barbaric three-drug lethal injection protocol — to choose to die a painful and gruesome death in the electric chair.” The day before the new execution dates were announced, a federal judge denied a stay request from David Earl Miller, who had sought execution by firing squad as an alternative to the three-drug lethal injection.

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States, examining the scope and consequences of secrecy in the application of the death penalty in the United States. The report, released on November 20, 2018, tells the story of the expansion of execution secrecy and the questionable practices that states have attempted to keep from public view. It details how, in their efforts to obtain execution drugs, states have used secrecy laws to conceal evidence that they have broken state and federal laws, deliberately induced contract breaches, lied to or misled legitimate drug suppliers, contracted with shady international suppliers and questionable domestic pharmacies, and swapped drugs with each other without proper storage and transport controls. As a result, an increasing number of executions have been botched: in 2017, more than 60% of executions carried out with midazolam produced eyewitness accounts of the execution going amiss. The report also describes how secrecy laws have undermined the reliability and legitimacy of court proceedings in which prisoners have challenged state execution practices as violating the Constitution’s ban on cruel or unusual punishments. “State officials have suppressed information that could prove prisoners’ claims while simultaneously arguing those claims should be rejected because they are unproven,” the report explains. “Over and over again, states have violated the law in the name of carrying out the law,” DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham said. “And when the public has uncovered information the states have tried to conceal, it has exposed an ever-expanding scope of misconduct and incompetence. ‘Trust me, I’m the Government,’ is not an acceptable justification for execution secrecy.”

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Latest News

NEWS (3/13): Governor Gavin Newsom has imposed a moratorium on executions in California, granting reprieves to the 737 prisoners on the state's death row. He has also withdrawn the state's execution protocol and closed the death chamber in San Quentin prison. You can view Governor Newsom's news conference announcing the moratorium here.

TENNESSEE: The Tennessee House voted 73-22 on March 18 to pass a bill that would remove the appeal to the court of criminal appeals in death-penalty cases. HB 0258 would allow for direct appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, eliminating one level of appellate review in death-penalty cases.

ARKANSAS: The Arkansas Senate approved a sweeping execution secrecy bill on March 13 by a vote of 25-9. SB 464 would conceal from the public documents and information relating to the state's purchase of execution drugs and the identity of the drug supplier and make disclosure of such information a felony.

NEBRASKA: The Judiciary Committee of the Nebraska unicameral legislature voted 5-2 on March 15 to advance to the full Senate LB44, a bill that would repeal the state's death penalty. The legislature repealed the death penalty in 2015 and overrode Governor Rickett's veto of the bill. However, enactment of the bill was suspended pending the outcome of a voter referendum in 2016 that blocked the bill from going into effect. See Recent Legislative Activity.

TENNESSEE: The House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on Criminal Justice voted on March 13 to send HB1455 to the full committee for a hearing on whether defendants who suffered from severe mental illness at the time of the offense should be exempted from the death penalty.

NEWS (3/4): The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has overturned the death sentence of Arizona death-row prisoner Christopher Spreitz. A divided panel of the court ruled 2-1 that the Arizona courts unconstitutionally required Speitz to prove that his history of substance abuse had a causal link to the offense before it could be given any weight as mitigating evidence to potentially spare his life.

NEWS (3/4): The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari in the case of Searcey v. Dean, declining to review the $28 million judgment a federal jury entered against Gage County, Nebraska as a result of the wrongful prosecution and conviction of “the Beatrice Six” for a rape and murder they did not commit. Several of the wrongfully accused falsely confessed or testified falsely against others after having been threatened with the death penalty.NEWS (3/1): The Harris County District Attorney's office has accepted the recommendation of a Special Prosecutor's report that death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown be declared "actually innocent." The declaration paves the way for Brown to collect compensation from the state of Texas for his wrongful conviction and death sentence.

NEWS (2/28): Texas has executed Billie Wayne Coble. It was the third execution in the U.S. in 2019 and the second in Texas. Coble, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, was the 560th prisoner executed in Texas since executions resumed in the 1970s, nearly 5 times more than any other state. See Execution List 2019 and Execution Database.

Texas authorities removed Coble's son Gordon Wayne Coble and grandson Dalton Wayne Coble from the execution witness room following an outburst after the lethal injection drugs were administered and charged them with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

NEWS (2/28): The California Supreme Court has upheld convictions and death sentences imposed on Oswaldo Amezcua and Joseph Flores by a Los Angeles County jury in 2005. Neither defendant presented any mitigating evidence in the penalty phase of their joint trial.

NEWS (2/28): A three-judge panel sentenced Arron Lawson to death for a quadruple murder in Lawrence County, Ohio. It was the second new death sentence of 2019, both imposed after defendants were permitted to waive their right to jury sentencing. In January, a Jackson County, Florida judge sentenced Rocky Beamon to death after Beamon waived his right to a jury sentencing and asked the court for a death sentence.

NEWS (2/22): California Governor Gavin Newsome has ordered that more extensive DNA testing be performed in the case of death-row prisoner Kevin Cooper. Cooper has long maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder for which he was sentenced to death.

NEWS (2/19): The U.S. Supreme Court has denied certiorari, declining to review an appeal filed by Arkansas Judge Wendell Griffen challenging the Arkansas Supreme Court's decision barring him from handling any capital cases as a result of his participation in an anti-death penalty rally in which he strapped himself to a gurney to protest executions.

Howard University law professor Robin Konrad, former DPIC Director of Research and Special Projects, joins Executive Director Robert Dunham and current Director of Research and Special Projects Ngozi Ndulue to discuss DPIC's November 2018 report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. Konrad, the lead author of the report, provides an overview of the expansion of state secrecy in the use of the death penalty, and the three discuss the policy implications of the lack of accountability and transparency in the administration of capital punishment.

DPIC'S YEAR END REPORT: The Death Penalty Information Center's 2018 analysis of developments in the U.S. death penalty,The Death Penalty in 2018: Year End Report reports that death-penalty usage remained near generational lows, with executions below 30 and new death sentences below 50 for the fourth straight year. The size of death row dropped nationwide for the 18th year in a row. Read the report here. Listen to our Discussions With DPIC podcast about the report here.

LATEST EXONERATION: Former death-row prisoner Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin was exonerated in Florida on November 5, 2018, as Seminole County prosecutors dropped all charges against him. He is the 164th person wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death to have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1973, and the 28th exonerated in Florida. See Innocence.

DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham testified on February 19 before the New Hampshire House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee on the bill to replace New Hampshire's death penalty with life without possibility of parole. That testimony, which addressed the question of whether the death penalty has made the public and New Hampshire police safer, has now been uploaded to YouTube. You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWgyllPbXN0.

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DPIC Podcast Series: We have begun a new set of podcasts on the death penalty in each state, each with interesting historical facts. The following are now available: Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, District of Columbia, Rhode Island, and New Jersey. Check out our podcasts now! Also listen to DPIC's podcasts on death penalty issues.